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Viral Marketing Strategies
Copyright Herman Drost
One of the most time consuming aspects of online marketing
is finding the most effective strategies to attract
visitors to your web site. If you set up a viral marketing
campaign correctly, you have the opportunity of gaining
1000s of visitors for years to come.
Definition of viral marketing
This is the online term for word-of-mouth advertising. You
provide something that encourages others to spread the word
about your product, quickly and inexpensively with little
effort on your part. This potentially creates exponential
growth in the message's visibility and effect. The message
spreads in a viral form in a manner similar to the
spreading of a common cold virus from person to person.
One example of successful viral marketing is Hotmail, which
began offering free e-mail accounts, with a link back to
Hot Mail at the end of every e-mail message sent by one of
its customers. That spread the word about the service like
a virus, with every customer a virtual "carrier" of the
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Benefits of Viral Marketing
1. Free advertising
2. Short term gains - gain immediate visitors.
3. Long terms gains - attracts visitors for years to come.
4. Causes exponential growth – reaches a large audience.
5. Automate your marketing methods - set it up once and
forget about it.
6. Inexpensive to set-up – it primarily involves some
investment of time.
7. Viral marketing tools are easy to develop i.e. you can
create an e-book without knowing how to write.
8. Quickly build your reputation.
9. Easy to combine with other marketing methods – i.e.
include as a bonus with other products.
10. Increase targeted traffic to your web site.
Viral Marketing Strategies
1. Write articles - allow people to reprint your articles
on their web site, in their ezine, newsletter, magazine or
e-books. Include your resource box and the option for
article reprints at the bottom of each article. Make sure
that the link in your resource box is live so that all
people that use your article will link back to your site.
2. Create a free e-Book - give your e-book away to your
visitors and other editors or webmasters within your target
market. Encourage them to pass it on. Insert ezine
subscription links or affiliate links to the products
throughout your e-book. Subscriptions to your newsletter
will increase in proportion to the number of places your
e-book is placed.
3. Set up an affiliate program - affiliate programs provide
a financial incentive for other sites to link to yours.
Make sure your commission is enough to make this attractive
to web site owners. As the number of affiliates increases,
so do your visitors and sales.
4. Getting sites to link to your site - you can receive
ongoing traffic from other sites by asking them to link to
yours. If it’s a site that already has lots of traffic, you
will see an immediate increase in traffic to your own site.
Only contact site owners who have products that compliment
the products on your site.
5. Send out news releases - create a free service or
product that is available on your site. The most important
aspect is to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free
service, or digital download. If your news release is
carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could
have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers
quite inexpensively.
6. Viral software - offering a free download of a script,
e-book, calendar, etc is an effective method for gaining of
new subscribers to your ezine. You can also market your
product by including your logo or marketing message with
your download.
7. Create an e-course - give your visitor numerous chances
to respond to your offer by creating an email course or
courses. You accomplish this by writing a series of small
articles outlining the benefits of your product, then
distribute them automatically over several days or weeks
with an auto responder. This can be set up automatically
for the product or ezine you are promoting.
8. RSS Feeds - this is a relatively new viral marketing
method. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It was
originally used by news organizations to syndicate their
news stories. RSS Feeds are now used to automatically
distribute content to blogs. They can also be used to
distribute articles to web site owners and ezine publishers
throughout the web.
Conclusion
Using these viral marketing strategies will help boost your
web presence, by rapidly increasing web traffic, gaining
more links and building your reputation as an expert in
your field.
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